How Al Jazeera English reports local crises to the global citizen: an expansion of a mediated global public sphere?

This research project looks into the case study of Al Jazeera English (AJE), an offshoot of Al Jazeera Arabic, as a recent entrant into the field of international Satellite television news which broadcasts in English. The establishment of AJE is seen by the channel itself as an opportunity to provide an Arab perspective on issues and events in the Middle East to a global audience, in addition to counter-balancing the coverage of dominant global news media. This study seeks to understand the nature and role of AJE as a new global broadcaster and how it can be understood in relation to dominant global broadcasters. In turn, this study aims to understand the extent to which AJE could play a role in expanding a mediated global public sphere. This will be achieved by studying its news reporting and comparing it to that of other dominant media---namely BBC and CNN. Nancy Fraser (2007) recently revisited her depiction of the public sphere in what she describes as a 'postWestphalian' world. In this revisiting of the public sphere, Fraser argues that most of the literature on the public sphere beginning with Jurgen Habermas, and including her own, has failed to respond to a more globalising public. Fraser proposes that a transnational public sphere be seen as a space where 'inclusiveness' is required in a 'postWestphalian' world and stresses the need to address not only 'who' is to emerge as participants but more importantly 'how'. To shed light on this point, this comparative study of AJE, BBC and CNN looks into the case of the six Bulgarian medical workers who were sentenced to death in Libya in 2007 for allegedly infecting over 400 Libyan children with the AIDS virus. A critical discourse analysis (CDA) has been employed as a methodological framework to examine AJE's textual output and compare it to that of BBC and CNN. This study has found that AJE's attempt to enter the global public sphere, has been a balancing act. The analytic study conducted in this paper has revealed that the reports presented by AJE journalists from a Western background tended to report alongside similar lines to that of BBC and CNN; however AJE journalists coming from an Arab tradition of reporting presented similar discourses to those commonly found in Arab based coverage. This leads to the realisation of the existence of two cultures of journalism within AJE that are emerging. This suggests that news content is formed in accordance with the cultural reflection of the reporters themselves, which is quite evident in this research on the news coverage of AJE. Hence the detected tension found in this study not only exists between AJE and dominant news broadcasters such as BBC and CNN, but also exists within itself as the two emerging cultures of journalism within AJE have exposed. AJE can therefore be categorised as asserting both domination and resistance within the global public sphere, or what I argue is both a role AJE is playing in complementing discourses within the global public sphere whilst offering notions of counter-discourses